Eva Stachniak - Garden of Venus

Larrey’s name made no visible impression on young Countess Potocka who led them upstairs and into a grand salon that had been turned into the sick room. The enormous empire bed, by the wall, was covered by a golden throw. A day bed and an armchair had been placed beside it. An Oriental screen hid the paraphernalia of illness, the medicine bottles, the chamber pot. The air was thick with the smells of almond milk, camomile, and mint. The underlying whiff of ammonia made Thomas clear his throat.

The countess was fully dressed, reclining on the bed, her eyes closed, black eyelashes evenly set in her white lids. She was breathing slowly, as if asleep. One look was enough to make Thomas see that the illness had melted the skin on her bones. She was deathly pale.

She doesn’t need a doctor, he thought, she needs a miracle.

His eyes lingered over two women standing by their mistress. One was obviously a maid, of rosy plumpness, flaxen braids wound around her head like a crown. The other, in her pale yellow dress, a cameo brooch pinned to a lace collar around her neck, he decided, was the nurse. Mademoiselle Rosalia Romanowicz. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to Ignacy’s words. He vaguely recalled the praises of her nursing and her devotion to her mistress. A daughter of a Polish hero and a Jewess from Uman. Or was that someone else entirely? He noted the thick auburn hair, pulled back and held tight by a barrette, in the shape of folded hands.

‘Good morning, Doctor Bolecki,’ the countess said, turning to Ignacy. The back of her head rested on the day bed. ‘I’ve been waiting for you all this time.’

This was a reproach.

‘I came as soon as I could, Madame,’ Ignacy replied in what Thomas thought was too much of an eager schoolboy’s tone.

Thomas made a step toward the bed, but stopped, unsure if the examination should begin that abruptly. The countess’s eyes were clearly her most striking feature. Large, black and luminous eyes that lit up her face. Fixed on him, now, probing. Suddenly he became aware of how baggy his trousers had become and wished he had ordered a new pair.

‘Doctor Lafleur, great surgeon, Madame la Comtesse,’ Ignacy continued what to Thomas sounded like a mountebank’s pitch for snake oil and the elixir of youth. ‘The only one, Your Highness, I would trust with my own life.’ He mentioned the years spent at la Charité, lectures at Val de Grâce, and once again flaunted Baron Larrey’s personal recommendation.

‘Please, my dear Doctor,’ the countess said, lifting her hand to her lips, and Ignacy stopped. Her eyes did not leave Thomas for a second, taking in the aquiline nose, his reddened hands, and baggy trousers shiny at the knees.

To steady himself, Thomas thought of his father who had been beaten by his mistress for being inadvertently in her way. He recalled wounds masters had inflicted on other servants: burns on the hands and legs, cuts, lashes. In Russia, he reminded himself, serfs were called ‘slaves’ for a good reason. Once, in Vilna, he had been asked to treat a man whose back had been broken by the lashes his master commanded. When the man died a few hours later, his master promptly ordered another serf to marry the widow.

‘What are you thinking of, Doctor Lafleur?’ the countess asked in a low, raspy voice that held a note of irony as if she had guessed his thoughts and already found fault with his reasoning.

‘You should not exert yourself, Madame la Comtesse,’ Thomas replied and he approached the bed. He tried not to look at her eyes but to observe. The shade of her skin, the spots on the pillowcase were all hints as to what her body was harbouring inside.

‘Yes, Doctor,’ she said, tilting her head slightly. ‘From now on, your words will be my commands.’

The smile she gave him lit up her face making him think of a child offered a rare treat, a reward long lost, despaired over, but never forgotten. In the morning light that swept over her, Thomas thought he had seen the secret of her attraction, the way she must have appeared to all those men Ignacy spoke about. Men who had loved her over other women. Yes, he had seen through her pale, luminous skin no longer fresh and supple; through her parched lips folding as if ready to grant him secrets revealed to no one else. You will be my saviour, her eyes said. There will be no one else, but you and me. You have all my attention, all my loyalty. Nothing and nobody else matters.

‘I’ve dismissed Doctor Horn, my Russian doctor. He was not helping me at all.’

‘Are you in much pain?’ Thomas asked, piqued by the casual reference to a hapless man who had, undoubtedly, tried his best.

The countess stopped smiling. Her beautiful eyes were dry.

‘They say that my womb is rotting, Doctor, and it hurts. Is that what you want me to describe to you?’

‘But Madame la Comtesse,’ Ignacy protested. ‘Courage! You are in the best of hands.’

‘Let Doctor Lafleur decide,’ the countess said.

The nurse stepped forward, placing her hand on the patient’s arm with a gesture of appropriation. A firm, steady gesture meant as a warning.

‘Madame slept well last night,’ she said. Her voice was pleasant, her French just slightly foreign. Foreign, Thomas would reflect later only because, in spite of its flawlessness, he could attach it to no specific region or city. ‘But today she complained of pain in her back. On both sides.’

A bit over twenty, the thought flashed through his mind, still considering the possibility (however slight) of an operation. Good solid constitution. There was no frailty about her, no threat of fainting spells. She would not be a nuisance.

‘Rosalia, my dear,’ the countess said. ‘Send everyone away. Let the doctor examine me.’

‘Everyone,’ she added, seeing how her daughter hesitated. ‘Only Rosalia and Dr Lafleur will stay. No one else.’

The countess was, indeed, in the last stages of the disease that had been ravaging her for years: her face a wax mask over the skull; her arms, hands transparent. Thomas could almost see the tendons clinging to her bones. She had prepared herself carefully for this visit. Her clothes were of embroidered velvet, the kind maids were told to be careful with for their wages would never pay for the damage carelessness might inflict on the fabric. He had noted that the dress had been hastily altered to fit a thinning body. The lingering smell of musk and wild roses told him that she had bathed and oiled her body for this encounter.

As she stood up, she tried to hold herself straight, but the effort it required was obvious. Even in her slippers, flat and soft, she rested her arm on the day bed, to steady herself. The nurse jumped forward to hold her, but the countess shook her head.

Her eyes were now following his every move. She was, he decided, studying him very carefully: the way he stood, sat down, opened his bag, assembled his stethoscope.

He began to establish her medical history, the way he had been examining his patients at la Charité. She said she was fifty, but even though traces of obvious beauty were still visible, he could see she was not telling the truth. Closer to sixty, he would say.

‘How many children have you had, Madame?’

‘Ten.’

‘How many are still alive?’

‘Six.’

‘How old were you when your first child was born?’

‘Is it important?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your medical history is important.’

‘I was seventeen.’

‘Were there any complications?’

‘No, my children came easily to this world. They didn’t cause me trouble then.’

He asked if she remembered her childhood diseases, and she laughed. ‘In my childhood, Doctor, there were two kinds of diseases: those you survived and those you did not.’